When Mai* started studying psychology in mid-2019, she looked forward to making the trip to the university for her tutorials, where she’d have lively conversations with classmates as they grappled with new ideas.
But her excitement turned to dread when her face-to-face tutorials were swapped for Zoom meetings in 2020.
“People don’t switch on their camera – you just see names,” Mai says. “It’s very lonely, very isolating. There’s nobody to talk to if you’re struggling through a question.”
Lecture halls, once packed with students, have been emptied in favour of pre-recorded talks, Mai says, some of which are reused from past years and are out of date. Even lab demonstrations have been replaced by lifeless, directionless Zoom breakout rooms.
Mai has sat through online classes that slumped into silence just halfway through their one-hour time slot as her lecturer pleaded for the grid of faceless audience names to engage with simple questions.
“Nobody spoke,” she says. “It’s so awkward, it’s so painful, you just want to get out.”
As soon as she graduated Mai moved to Hobart to study medicine, a rare course with compulsory in-person practical classes. Lockdowns were a fading memory and she expected a packed campus.
But, apart from her medicine classmates, it was deserted, she says – as it remains two years later.
“I had this very naive vision of, ‘Oh, wow, I’m going to meet so many students from many different places’ – [but] a lot of students don’t attend, just because they have other work and life commitments,” she says.
Australian students like Mai are entering universities expecting an experience many establishments no longer offer. They imagine themselves with time and space to explore big ideas with their peers and teachers, sharing vibrant discussions and a on a path to independent adulthood, only to find no one has time to sit around on the quad and talk.
Those who can’t afford to spend all week on campus – or who aren’t given the option for in-person classes – worry they’re missing out on a higher-quality education while being charged ever-increasing fees.
Students under financial pressure have cut back on classes and picked up more work, while cash-strapped universities have held on to unpopular but cheaper online classes. The result, students say, is a vicious cycle of falling campus attendance: as fewer students attend class in person, attending class in person becomes even less appealing, and universities offer fewer in-person opportunities because students are not showing up.
Many, like Mai, now ask themselves: “What’s the point of going on campus?”
Australian expectations for university life date back to the pre-1980s ideal of study without work, according to Dr Thuc Bao Huynh, a research fellow at Monash University’s Centre for Youth Policy and Education Practice.
“If someone was a student, they wouldn’t really be doing all that much else except being a student,” he says. “That’s not the case any more.”
The myth of campus life is butting up against the modern reality in which increasingly few students have the luxury of their studies and social life being their main responsibilities. Since the 1990s growing numbers of Australians from a broader range of backgrounds have taken the opportunity to study while working part-time to support themselves. Cost-of-living pressures have accelerated this trend, Huynh says, forcing more students to treat university as a part-time commitment.
As rent and living costs have risen, the share of students with jobs has jumped, according to several analyses. Nearly half of all students opted to study part time instead of full time in 2023.
“Being a student is 1740407399 mashed in with everything else that young people are going through,” Huynh says. “It’s just another thing that they have to deal with.”
Struggling to juggle university and work and given the option to do their coursework online, Jedd Brockhouse’s classmates at La Trobe University in Melbourne’s north see no point in coming on campus.
“If you know you don’t have to be there, then why fit in an hour of traffic to go and sit in a class for two hours?” he says.
Sam Lane only learned how much he had missed out on when he took a break from his law classes to try his hand at art history.
He says he went to university in 2019 looking for the picture of campus life his parents had painted: “That kind of traditional sitting on the quad, going for beers and talking about your readings … everyone’s on the lawn at the same time and you run into people.”
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Lane got glimpses of that fantasy world at the University of New South Wales art school on Sydney’s bustling Oxford Street. His three-hour long art history classes forced him and his peers to meet face-to-face while giving them time to grapple with and debate aesthetics and philosophy.
“You didn’t feel like you were just there to be chewed up and spat out of the lecture hall,” he says. “If something was interesting to the class, you could delve into it.”
But once his art tutorial ended Lane had to hurry back to UNSW’s main campus in Sydney’s east for classes that had been required to cut their on-campus teaching hours, with professors rushing through impossible quantities of information.
“There’s no time to chat, there’s no time to get to know the people around you,” he says. “You’re too busy trying to get through all the content super quickly.”
Lane is now coming to the end of his degree and has watched as falling in-person attendance strains student societies and puts a halt to long-running party traditions, including battle of the bands events.
“People realise what they lost and really want to get back into it … [but] there’s no good time to put it [on] because there’s not enough people on campus, they can’t get a turnout,” he says. “It’s just a bit dead.”
The trend to online learning reflects broader pressures: reduced federal funding and the threatened loss of international students, a major income source, have forced universities to find savings. At the same time, university staff are teaching 200,000 more students than they were a decade ago.
Kaab Qureshi, a second-year student at Canberra’s Australian National University, says he has had difficulty learning in some classes that have become “ginormous” as the university cut and condensed contact hours.
“They just want to cut costs as fast as they can,” he says. “I believe they put reputation and profits above student engagement and support.”
For those who can afford to hang around on campus, not even overstuffed face-to-face classes have stopped them from finding the community they wanted.
Kristy Sauw, Qureshi’s classmate at ANU, says her first year of university couldn’t have been better. After moving from a Wagga Wagga high school to an on-campus residential hall, it was easy for her make friends and get to classes in person.
“I made a lot of friends in my philosophy tutorial because we viewed it as an hour to just yap and it was really fun,” she says. “As much as we focused on what we were actually talking about, we also just got to bond and talk over random topics.”
Qureshi put up the extra money to live in a residential hall for his first year but rising rents have forced him to move back in with his family, a 90-minute drive away.
“As much as I might want to be on campus, if I can’t afford it, I can’t afford it,” he says. “Even though it’s better for my mental health, it’s just something I would have to give up.
“That’s just the uni life.”
*Name has been changed
